Your Phone Doesn't Only Listen To You, Technology Prof Says

Most of us regularly disclose our information to a wide range of websites and apps. We do this when we grant them certain permissions, or allow “cookies” to track our online activities. So-called “first-party cookies” allow websites to “remember” certain details about our interaction with the site

Photo Insert: A Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent can train itself based on feedback gained from user interactions, akin to how a young child will learn to repeat an action if it leads to a reward.

For instance, login cookies let you save your login details so you don’t have to re-enter them each time, Dana Rezazadegan, a lecturer at the Swinburne University of Technology wrote for ZME Science.

Third-party cookies, however, are created by domains that are external to the site you’re visiting. The third-party will often be a marketing company in a partnership with the first-party website or app. The latter will host the marketer’s ads and grant it access to data it collects from you (which you will have given it permission to do — perhaps by clicking on some innocuous looking popup).

As such, the advertiser can build a picture of your life: your routines, wants, and needs. These companies constantly seek to gauge the popularity of their products and how this varies based on factors such as a customer’s age, gender, height, weight, job, and hobbies. By classifying and clustering this information, advertisers improve their recommendation algorithms, using something called recommender systems to target the right customers with the right ads.

There are several machine-learning techniques in artificial intelligence (AI) that help systems filter and analyze your data, such as data clustering, classification, association, and reinforcement learning (RL). An RL agent can train itself based on feedback gained from user interactions, akin to how a young child will learn to repeat an action if it leads to a reward.

By viewing or pressing “like” on a social media post, you send a reward signal to an RL agent confirming you’re attracted to the post — or perhaps interested in the person who posted it. Either way, a message is sent to the RL agent about your personal interests and preferences.

If you still think your phone is listening to you, there’s a simple experiment you can try. Go to your phone’s settings and restrict access to your microphone for all your apps. Pick a product you know you haven’t searched for in any of your devices and talk about it out loud at some length with another person.

Make sure you repeat this process a few times. If you still don’t get any targeted ads within the next few days, this suggests your phone isn’t really “listening” to you. It has other ways of finding out what’s on your mind.

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